Rocker war in Quebec

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Cowl with the badge of the Hells Angels Québec

The rocker war in Québec ( French Guerre des Motards ) is a violent conflict that took place between the two outlaw motorcycle clubs Hells Angels and Rock Machine from 1994 to 2002 in the Canadian province of Québec . This fight was about control of territories and the associated high income from illegal business. More than 150 people died during the rocker war.

background

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was founded in California in 1948 , the first charter in Canada originated in Montreal in 1977 . By 1985, two more charters in Québec were added. At the time, the Hells Angels controlled 75% of the drug trade in Montreal.

In 1985, the Québec and Nova Scotia charter accused the Laval charter of embezzling drug funds. Both the leader Yves Trudeau and the members of the Laval Charter should therefore be murdered. A meeting was arranged at a clubhouse in Lennoxville , at which five rockers who had been dispatched as a delegation were ambushed and shot. The March 24, 1985 event went down in history as the Lennoxville Massacre . Trudeau, who had not attended the meeting because he was in a detox facility, became a police informant after the massacre . He confessed to 43 murders and put 43 other Angels behind bars.

Maurice Boucher and Salvatore Cazzetta were then members of a White Supremacist motorcycle club in Montreal called SS . Both wanted to join the Hells Angels , but had different views on the legality of the murders. While Boucher joined the Hells Angels in late 1987 and, after a fast career, rose to become Canada's most important rocker in the early 90s, Cazzetta rejected the massacre and founded The Rock Machine MC together with breakaway members of the Angels in 1986 .

The war and its aftermath

In 1993, Cazzetta arranged the import of 10,000 kg of Colombian cocaine from the United States . While trying to smuggle 200 kg of cocaine into Canada, he was arrested in 1994 and four years later extradited to Florida , where he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The weakening of Rock Machine by the arrest of Cazzetta took Boucher as an opportunity to eliminate Rock Machine as a competitor and to establish a monopoly on drug trafficking. Previously independent drug dealers were given an ultimatum to either purchase drugs exclusively from the Hells Angels in the future or to live with the consequences. People who resisted were beaten up first, and if that didn't work, they were murdered. By doing this, the Hells Angels brought more than 40 gangs under their control by 1998 . In response, Rock Machine and various independent drug dealers founded “ The Alliance ”, an association with ties to the Canadian Mafia, which was supposed to counterbalance the increasing market power of the Hells Angels.

The Hells Angels then began to organize so-called puppet clubs , front organizations that were supposed to attack and weaken Rock Machine. On July 13, 1994, Pierre Daoust, a member of the Dead Riders and an ally of the Angels, was shot down by three men with more than 15 bullets in his workshop. He died in hospital an hour after the attack. Daoust is considered to be the first to die in the war. A few months later, on October 19, Maurice Lavoie was shot dead in Repentigny . Shortly before, he had decided to get his drugs from the Hells Angels and no longer from the Pelletier family, which was part of the Alliance. Boucher planned to murder Sylvain Pelletier in revenge. Pelletier died nine days after Lavoie was murdered by a bomb hidden in his car. At a meeting of the alliance it was decided to get rid of Boucher, but Boucher escaped a bomb placed for him.

These murders or attempted murders were followed by a war that would last until 2002. There were numerous shootings and bombings, for example on bars that were owned by rockers. Up to 1997 alone there were 88 bomb attacks. The Nomad Charter , founded in 1995 and led by Boucher, was particularly feared because it consisted of the most notorious members of the Hells Angels and was active throughout Québec. Robert Perrault, Québec's Minister of Public Security, commented on the rocker feuds in 1997, stating that they were in “a crisis situation”. He urged the government to enact anti-gang legislation modeled on the United States to counter organized crime .

A car bomb attack on August 9, 1995 in Montreal caused a stir . Marc Dubé, the driver of the car and the target of the attack, was dead on the spot. Eleven-year-old Daniel Desrochers, who was across the street, was fatally struck by shrapnel . After his death, the population demanded tougher police action. A month after Desrochers' death, the first full member of the Hells Angels was killed, which further fueled the war. At the funeral, nine bombs were detonated in retaliation.

A case from July 2000 is an example of the violence in the rocker war. Two masked men shot dead Robert Savard, a close friend of Boucher, in a restaurant. During the shooting, a friend of Savard's, Normand Descoteaux, was seriously injured and a waitress was hit in the leg by a stray bullet. A week later, Rock Machine allied Martin Bourget was shot dead in a park in Granby . A destroyed assault rifle and a burnt-out jeep were found nearby. This was the classic way rockers used to destroy tracks.

End of the war and aftermath

In 2001 Rock Machine became part of the Bandidos in a patch over . Many members then went to their old archenemy , the Hells Angels, as not all of them had been accepted as full members. While this weakened the intensity of the fighting, the war continued.

In 1998, a jury acquitted Maurice Boucher, who a year earlier had ordered the killing of prison guards Diane Lavigne and Pierre Rondeau in order to intimidate the judiciary. Two years later, the acquittal was overturned on appeal, and in May 2002 a court sentenced Boucher to life imprisonment for two murders and attempted murder. After Boucher's conviction, the rocker war finally ended.

In April 2009, 156 Hells Angels members and people were arrested, the majority of those in Québec. The arrested were charged with numerous criminal offenses, including countless drug offenses and 22 murders, which were committed between 1992 and 2009.

Victims of the rocker war

During the rocker war in Québec, more than 150 people died, the magazine Der Spiegel spoke in an issue from February 2000 of 125 dead between 1995 and 2000 alone. The journalist Julian Rubinstein , who had researched in the gang and rocker scene for several months and therefore was temporarily under the protection of the Canadian intelligence service CSIS , reported 162 deaths. The magazine High Times - which primarily deals with the topic of cannabis - also spoke of 160 dead, 175 attempted murders, 200 injured and 15 people who disappeared permanently. The Toronto Sun even reported more than 175 deaths caused by the war.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c julianrubinstein.com: From Details: Highway to Hell from March 2002, accessed on October 12, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b c d Paul Cherry: The Biker Trials: Bringing Down the Hells Angels. ECW Press, 2005 ISBN 1-55490-250-9 . ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  3. ↑ La Presse : Cazzetta, membre influent du crime organisé of October 17, 2008, accessed on October 14, 2013.
  4. ^ The Economist : Hells Angels, Crime and Canada, March 26, 1998, accessed October 14, 2013.
  5. ↑ a b The Baltimore Sun : Canada biker war bloodies Quebec Angels: Forty-eight people have died in Canada's biker war, victims of the Hell's Angels' ruthless bid to control the nation's drug trafficking, prostitution, money laundering and smuggling. dated May 17, 1997, accessed October 14, 2013.
  6. ↑ Radio Canada: Anniversaire de la mort de Daniel Desrochers of August 9, 2005, accessed October 14, 2013.
  7. ↑ Rense.com: Canadian Biker Wars Heat Up - Over 140 Murders To Date . dated July 9, 2000, accessed October 14, 2013.
  8. ↑ CTV: Dozens arrested in Québec Hells Angels sweep, April 15, 2009, accessed October 14, 2013.
  9. ↑ Jörg Diehl, Thomas Heise, Claas Meyer-Heuer: Rocker War: Why Hells Angels and Bandidos are becoming more and more dangerous , Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , 2013, ISBN 978-3-641-09431-7 . ( limited preview in Google Book search)
  10. ↑ Der Spiegel : When in doubt, strike from February 7, 2000, accessed on October 12, 2013.
  11. ↑ High Times: Quebec Biker War ( Memento of the original from August 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hightimes.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. dated June 18, 2002, accessed October 12, 2013.
  12. ↑ Toronto Sun : Former biker says sorry, is denied parole of February 10, 2011, accessed October 14, 2013.

literature

  • Edward Winterhalder / Wil de Clercq: The Takeover - From the Rock Machine to the Bandidos. The biker war in Canada. Stattverlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-937542-03-4